Meet the BEXUS team: GLITCH

“A great opportunity to see how all parts of a space project work, from start to finish.” GLITCH Team

The main goal of GLITCH (Gamma Light Interference in Technological Circuitry and Hardware) is to measure the Single Event Upsets (SEU) in SRAM during a solar maximum. This means that the experiment aims to measure disturbances that occur in memory due to radiation. An additional goal of the project is to measure the particle environment at higher latitudes which will also be impacted by the solar maximum. The end goal of the project is to answer how much of a threat the environment around Kiruna poses with regards to the increased radiation experienced during a solar cycle peak. This would in turn help future missions make informed design decisions to properly protect equipment and hardware. This is especially important for innovations like FPGAs and A.I.

To achieve the above-mentioned goals for the experiment SEUs are going to be monitored and measured during a stratospheric balloon flight from Kiruna. The experiment will be housed in the GLITCH box. Within the box there will be several SRAM chips which will be monitored and checked for errors by an FPGA. The FPGA will run software that checks for errors, if any are found they are logged and corrected. There will also be a radiation sensor that continuously measures radiation. Additionally, the box will have other sensors that monitor vital parameters and ensure smooth operations.

The GLITCH team is composed of 18 students from Luleå Technological University in Kiruna Sweden. The team is organized into different branches, focused on different parts of the project. These branches are management, electrical, mechanical, outreach, science and software. Each of these sub-teams focuses on their respective parts of the experiment. The GLITCH members are a mix of Swedish students and students of multiple other nationalities. All members are enrolled in one of the space related master programs at LTU.

GLITCH experiment in a nutshell